In many sophisticated product development processes, execution and oversight of the process is a significant portion of the production effort. Operators must be trained to understand production procedures and the use of individual tools. Supervisors must track and schedule production tasks. File and disk space management has been estimated to consume as high as 80 percent of the production labor time.
Workflow management is used to automate production systems. Workflow management has two major sub-fields, control of standard practices and creation of custom processing flows. Workflow management of standard practices is commonly applied to business processes, and generally consists of software in which one or more workflow procedures are embodied in the software. Workflow management of custom processing flows generally consists of systems to build procedures from a collection of tools. Such systems are commonly found in commercial image processing packages (Khoros, Erdas Imagine, AVS), and rely on the user to understand the processing and tools being used. Such image processing systems do not generally support the status and tracking needed for production.
Alternatively, workflow management can be performed manually, using tools for tracking status. When done manually, however, operators must track and record the location of all intermediate files, and production managers must control the movement of data between the different operating stages.
All of the existing methods for workflow management of custom processing flows require a great deal of knowledge and/or training on the part of the users. The user must be aware of the availability, use, and caveats of each software tool to be incorporated in the workflow procedure.
Depending upon the particular method being used, the user may also be responsible for tracking filenames of intermediate products, recording completion status information, and moving data between configured areas. The effort required to do this has been measured to be up to 40 percent of the total labor cost of the production.